Dumbing down political assassination.

A reader just sent me this clip of Liz Trotta — who’s apparently a contributor to Fox News — casually, and with a chuckle, suggesting that it would be a “good idea” for somebody to kill both Osama and Obama, people she apparently can’t tell apart. Is it possible that she’s trying to make Senator Clinton look good by comparison?

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Between this, and watching Youtube videos of coverage from the “heartland” which involves a lot of people saying “I’m not a racist or nothing, but I wouldn’t vote for…. someone like… that”, I’m getting a thrillingly ulcerous feeling in the pit of my cockles.

That looked like a calculated error to me. I expect this whole year we’ll be listening to conservative assholes “forgetting” whether they’re talking about a presidential candidate or an international terrorist.

It will work enough to be annoying, but I look forward to the backlash, in which people post millions of YouTube videos of neocons saying “I don’t know,” or “Whoops, I get those mixed up.” Seems like you could do hours of footage that way. Is the GOP the party of morons? Or is it merely the party of people pretending to be morons? When does it stop making a difference?

And instead of making a joke (“Talk about how you really feel”), we’ll maybe see the interviewer stopping and saying, “Excuse me, but we will not promote assassination of political candidates on this program. Please leave.” Then they will cry “censorship” and look even more stupid. Right?

Also, sure, it’s going to be annoying. But what isn’t? Honestly, I’m easily annoyed — by almost everything, it seems. Still, it’s not going to work this time. Because Obama doesn’t seem to worry about the little stuff. And he hits back on the big stuff, the stuff that matters. So it’s not going to work this time. And that’s not going to be annoying at all. Unless it is.

I don’t know if it’s unprecedented for a “journalist” (yes, those are scare quotes) to “joke” (again) about assassinating a presidential candidate. I imagine that it hasn’t happened much since Kennedy was killed. I bet Eric will know for sure. He’s assassination boy, after all.

Does Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint count as joking about assassinating the president (in this case Bush)?

I actually think that such “jokes” have become fairly common in recent years, largely on the right (Ann Coulter made a specialty out of eliminationist rhetoric aimed at liberals)….though not entirely, as the Baker novel suggests.

On a related note: there’s a good piece to be written on the rise in U.S. political culture of arguments questioning the very legitimacy of one’s political opponent’s victories. In recent years, these began with the right questioning Clinton’s legitimacy, largely using the goalpost-moving claim that his failure to get a majority of the popular vote (in three person races, of course) made him somehow illegitimate.

They continued in 2000, when the illegitimacy argument regarding Bush, the SCOTUS and Florida was actually pretty strong.

The legitimacy of Bush’s election in 2004 was also questioned by Greg Palast among others, though I think the case is harder to make than it is for 2000.

And this year we have Clinton already questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s upcoming nomination as Democratic presidential candidate.

Obviously elections do occasionally get stolen. And we want to be able to call a coup a coup. But given the origins of this rhetoric of illegitimacy and its frequent use to attack those who have won legitimately, I fear that its overuse will eventually either make it more difficult to complain about an actually illegitimate victory (the boy who cried wolf problem) or, even worse, will generally undermine Americans’ faith in democracy itself.*

*Though if they came to conclude that our particular implementation of democracy needs fundamental reform, that would be a good thing, imo.

Ben,
With respect to “there’s a good piece to be written on the rise in U.S. political culture . . .” there was a very good article in Harper’s within the last two years about the “stab-in-the-back” rhetoric coming from the right as a way to delegitimate the left and to create a right that sees itself as victimized in politics. If I weren’t lazy, I’d look up the title for you.